B Cloning an Oracle Home

Cloning an Oracle home involves creating a copy of the Oracle home and then configuring it for a new environment. If you are performing multiple Oracle Database installations, then you may want to use this method to create each Oracle home, because copying files from an existing Oracle Database installation takes less time than creating a new version of them. This method is also useful if the Oracle home that you are cloning has had patches applied to it. When you clone the Oracle home, the new Oracle home has the patch updates.

Create a ZIP or TAR file with the Oracle home (but not the Oracle base) directory.

For example, if the source Oracle installation is in the /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1, then you zip the dbhome_1 directory by using the following command:

# zip -r dbhome_1.zip /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1

You can also use the TAR command, for example:

# tar -cvf dbhome_1.tar /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1

Do not include the admin, fast_recovery_area, and oradata directories that are under the Oracle base directory. These directories are created in the target installation later, when you create a new database there.

Copy the ZIP or TAR file to the root directory of the target computer. If you use File Transfer Protocol (FTP), then transfer the ZIP or TAR file in binary mode only.

Extract the ZIP or TAR file content using the following command:

# unzip -d / dbhome_1.zip

# tar -xvf dbhome_1.tar

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each computer where you want to clone the Oracle home, unless the Oracle home is on a shared storage device.

On the target computer, change the directory to the unzipped Oracle home directory, and remove all the .ora (*.ora) files present in the unzipped $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory.

From the $ORACLE_HOME/clone/bin directory, run the clone.pl file for the unzipped Oracle home. Use the following syntax: